My iPhone was stolen while on a trip in London. I had my phone connected to a Photostream on my iPad but when I looked there was only some of the pictures. Does anyone know any way to retrieve the photos that were on my iPhone but aren’t showing up in Photostream?

Ston0058

April 2, 2014 at 9:29 am

If you have already backed up your iPhone with iTunes, you can recover deleted photos by the following steps using iTunes:
Click the File menu and select Devices > Restore from Back up.
Or
Open the iOS device's Summary tab. There are two ways to access this:
Click the device button in the upper right corner. (If viewing the iTunes Store, click the Library button in the upper right corner. The device button will then be visible.)
From any view in iTunes, click the View menu and select Show Sidebar. Select your iOS device in iTunes under Devices.
Click the Restore Backup button.

Jacobedward10

March 26, 2014 at 3:59 am

Unless you have make a backup before lost your iPhone, or your data will lost forever.

Unfortunately it's not looking good. As I understand it, Photostream only stores the last 1000 photos on devices that have been connected for longer than 30 days, and 30 days for everything else. If your iPad has been connected for a while, you will see up to 1000 photos in your "My Photostream" area. If you connected a device today, only the last 30 days' worth of photos would actually appear.

So to answer your question: no, you can't necessarily recover photos using Photostream. If you have a Mac running iPhoto or the iCloud Control Panel installed on Windows, there's a good chance all your photos have been downloading anyway – so check for those.

Jan F

March 10, 2014 at 7:52 pm

Also worth noting is that Photo Stream only uploads via WiFi*. That means unless your device was regularly connected to a WiFi network the pictures "never left your device".

* This only applies to the (automatic) Photo Stream. The Shared Photo stream also uploads via cellular network since it's a manual upload.